When hydrocarbons are produced, pore pressure reduction is induced. Pore pressure reduction, in turn, causes the increase of the effective stress in the reservoir solid framework. This change of effective stress alters the physical properties of the reservoirs such as porosity and permeability as well as the behavior of fractures and faults within the reservoir. Depending on the state of stress, existing fractures may behave as conduits or barriers to the flow of fluids (e.g., oil, gas, and water, etc.). For example, if the stress tensor rotates, a previously closed fracture network could open allowing preferential flow along the direction of the network, which would require a change in the reservoir management strategy for the oil field production.
Known solutions involve the modeling of the reservoir stress field using techniques that explicitly requires a numerical mesh to represent the reservoir with the exiting faults and fractures explicitly defined and discretized in the numerical mesh. However, given the uncertainty of the position of existing faults/fractures within the reservoir, it is common to create alternative scenarios for the position of the fractures/faults in the reservoir. In known solutions, each new scenario would require a distinct numerical mesh, or the remesh of the initial scenario.
Another drawback of the known solutions is the fact that they try to predict fracture initiation and propagation dynamically, which requires constant remeshing, and thus demanding significant computational resources. Given that is difficult to know the exact distribution of properties in the subsurface reservoir because of the lack of direct measurements, trying to predict the initiation and propagation of fractures and faults may produce results that are very different from reality.